Information services migrating to mobile

The news today about TomTom’s iPhone package and the upcoming release of the Vodafone 360 social address book service left me reflecting on how quickly the mobile is becoming our central point of connectedness. Beyond voice, it is now key to messaging, both SMS and email, and a host of other web services are fast gaining traction. Now SatNavs are moving onto the phone and integrating social networking into the address book gives us something we have never had before and can’t readily get elsewhere.

On top of this there is of course the blizzard of iPhone apps and a browsing experience that is much improved over the last couple of years.

This amounts to a very powerful trend, and will be a fertile ground for startups. That said, in mobile there is always the caveat that it is a trend everyone has seen coming for 10+ years now, and many of the incumbents who might be disrupted are better prepared to defend themselves than in other areas where change is happening this quickly.

(For those that are wondering, Vodafone 360 is based on technology from Zyb, a Danish company they acquired last year.)